The event, organized by New York City fan Joel Schlosberg, encourages bloggers of all stripes to discuss the Cornell astronomer's influence
in their lives. Schlosberg plans to compile a meta-blog -- a blog of blogs
-- following the event to link Sagan bloggers to one another.

Carl Sagan's famous book "Contact" has always had a
special place in my cranial unit. As science fiction, it's good,
if not my favorite. As a novel converted to a movie,
it's better than most such attempts, and that's even before the
prominent display of an Eventide DSP4000 Harmonizer®
brand special effects unit in a crucial scene. But my favorite
scene from the book was this, almost at the very end:

The Argus computer
was so persistent and inventive in its attempts to contact Ellie Arroway
that it almost conveyed a personal need to share the discovery.

The anomaly showed up
most starkly in Base 11 arithmetic, where it could be written out
entirely as zeros and ones. Compared with what had been received from
Vega, this could at best be a simple message, but its statistical
significance was high. The program reassembled the digits into a square
raster, an equal number across and down. The first line was an
uninterrupted file of zeros, left to right. The second line showed a
single numeral one, exactly in the middle, with zeros to the borders,
left and right. After a few more lines, an unmistakable arc had formed,
composed of ones. The simple geometrical figure had been quickly
constructed, line by line, self-reflexive, rich with promise. The last
line of the figure emerged, all zeros except for a single centered one.
The subsequent line would be zeros only, part of the frame.

Hiding in the
alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number,
was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of
noughts.

The universe was made
on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find
yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its
diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle -- another
circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be
richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like, or
what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this
universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later
you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't
have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the
nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small,
the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons,
subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that
antedates the universe.

The circle had
closed.

She found what she
had been searching for.

As written, the implication is that somehow the universe
was designed with the transcendental value of pi so arranged that its
digits were graphical as well as numerical. I was reading several
comments about this in other blogs and one stated that actually
constructing a universe and controlling the value of pi is "impossible
for God." Without debating that question, I submit that if
one searches long and hard enough, one will, indeed, find the "message"
in the digits of pi. Consider: As far as anyone knows, pi is
random and infinite. Should that not mean that any pattern,
including the one above, will eventually appear?

I did a little experiment. Sagan doesn't quantify
just how good the resolution of the circle in the square was. I
made a "real" circle that was 21 units in radius. This would
probably look pretty good pixellated if I weren't too lazy to select the
ones and zeros manually or write a program to calculate them. I
also made the best circles I could in grids of 5, 7, 9, and 11 units.
In a square of five units, seven if you count the frame, you would
expect the pattern shown every 500 trillion possibilities. Pi has been
calculated to millions of digits, and even the light blue pattern is
expected once in 8*10^50 possibilities. But infinity means infinity!
Who's to say that Sagan's message isn't already there!

In fact, if we look long enough, we'll probably also find the
circle in the frame, with SAGAN written in block letters, in English,
right in the center.